Financial contribution for QGIS bug fixing and quality assurance

QGIS developers at the Essen developer meeting, October 2014

The Swiss QGIS user group is supporting the QGIS project financially with CHF 10'000. This contribution is dedicated to bug fixing and quality assurance. To finance this contribution, the annual membership fees had been raised at the general assembly 2015 (A and B members only - companies, gov. agencies and universities).

The QGIS project is getting more and more powerful. More and better functionality unfortunately also means that there is a higher chance of new bugs. While it is relatively easy to find investors for new functionalities, it is much harder to find sponsors who invest in routine project management and bug fixing. The QGIS project worked hard to improve the code quality: it introduced an automatic testing framework, ran the code through automated code review systems, invests time in managing the bug queue and in fixing bugs through manual work of the developers. Because the work on fixing bugs is more complex and less interesting than working on new features, we think that bug fixing and QA should be paid work.

These efforts need to made on a routine basis and more intensely before a new release, in particular the LTS releases. The Swiss QGIS user group therefore supports this routine work financially and hopes that other larger institutional QGIS users and local QGIS user groups will follow this example. The UK and Portuguese user groups already do!